Asia Pacific|International Criminal Court Will Investigate Duterte Over Drug War

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International Criminal Court Will Investigate Duterte Over Drug War

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A complaint filed to the International Criminal Court calls President Rodrigo Duterte the “mastermind” of a campaign of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.CreditCreditRolex Dela Pena/European Pressphoto Agency

By Felipe Villamor

Feb. 8, 2018

MANILA — The International Criminal Court said on Thursday that it was opening a preliminary investigation into accusations that President Rodrigo Duterte and other Philippine officials had committed crimes against humanity in the course of the government’s deadly crackdown on drugs.

Fatou Bensouda, a prosecutor for the international court, said in a statement that the inquiry would gauge whether there was enough evidence to build a case. She said she would be looking at events since July 1, 2016, “in the context of the ‘war on drugs’ campaign.”

“My office undertakes this work with full independence and impartiality,” Ms. Bensouda said. “As we do, we hope to count on the full engagement of the relevant national authorities in the Philippines.”

Harry Roque, a spokesman for the Philippine president, said that the government’s crackdown was a “legitimate police operation” and that the president welcomed The Hague-based tribunal’s decision.

“He is sick and tired of being accused of the commission of crimes against humanity,” Mr. Roque told reporters in Manila.

In a 77-page complaint filed to the tribunal in April, a Filipino lawyer accused Mr. Duterte and 11 other officials of mass murder and crimes against humanity. He called Mr. Duterte the “mastermind” of a campaign of extrajudicial killings that dated to the late 1980s, when he became mayor of the southern city of Davao, and that greatly escalated after he became president.

“I am elated and vindicated,” Mr. Sabio said, adding that he was “confident we will hurdle this first big step, and hopefully a warrant of arrest will be issued by the I.C.C. against Duterte and his cohorts.”

Mr. Duterte, who has bragged about personally killing criminals as mayor of Davao, won the presidency promising to fill Manila Bay with the bodies of drug addicts. After taking office, he urged the police to kill drug suspects and promised to protect officers from prosecution. Thousands of Filipinos have been killed by the police, in what the authorities said were shootouts, or by unidentified gunmen.

Last year, after an outcry over the killings of three teenagers by police officers, Mr. Duterte suspended the police operations and put the antidrug campaign in the hands of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency. But he put the police back in charge in December. Last week, the police said that 46 people suspected of using or selling drugs had been killed by the police since then.

That brought the police’s official death toll from the campaign to over 4,000, a number much lower than the estimated 12,000 deaths reported by various international and local rights groups.

Senator Antonio Trillanes, a prominent political foe of Mr. Duterte, said the news of a preliminary inquiry “should jolt Duterte into realizing that he is not above the law. More important, this is the first step for the victims’ families quest for justice.”

Mr. Roque, the presidential spokesman, played down the significance of the inquiry, saying that the tribunal prosecutor was “merely exercising his mandate to determine whether there is reasonable basis to proceed.”

The tribunal can take cases only if a country’s own judicial system is unable or unwilling to pursue them, a condition that Mr. Roque said did not apply to the Philippines. “We view, of course, this decision of the prosecutor as a waste of the court’s time and resources,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Tribunal Will Investigate Duterte Over Drug War. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe